Posts Tagged ‘pendulum’
“Iteration, like friction, is likely to generate heat instead of progress”*…
A word of caution from the wondrous Randall Munroe (@xkcd): “Rotatation.”
* George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss
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As we resist repetition, we might send perpetual birthday greetings to Jean Bernard Léon Foucault; he was born on this date in 1819. A physicist who made an early measurement of the speed of light, discovered eddy currents, and is credited with naming the gyroscope (although he did not invent it), Foucault is best remembered for the (eponymously-named) Foucault’s Pendulum– suspended from the roof of the Panthéon in Paris– demonstrating the effects of the Earth’s rotation. Using a long pendulum with a heavy bob, he showed its plane was not static, but rotated at a rate related to Earth’s angular velocity and the latitude of the site.
In fact, essentially the same experimental approach had been used by Vincenzo Viviani as early as 1661; but it was Foucault’s work that caught the public imagination: within years of his 1851 experiment, the were “Foucault’s Pendulums” hanging– and attracting crowds–in major cities across Europe and America.
“Night Time Is the Right Time”*…
An architect based in Boston by day, Andrew Thomas Shea is a photography hobbyist at night and his latest project, Neon New England, celebrates a beloved common fixture across the Northeastern United States… vintage neon signs.
More of Shea’s sumptuous work at “Nocturnal photographs of New England’s famous American neon signs.”
* song written and first performed by Roosevelt Sykes (1937), bt better known in subsequent versions by inspired many subsequent versions, including hits by Ray Charles, Rufus and Carla (Thomas), and James Brown
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As we reflect on reflection, we might recall that it was on this date in 1851 that Léon Foucault famously used a pendulum suspended from the top of the dome in the Pantheon in Paris to demonstrate that the earth turns on its axis. (He used a technique developed by Vincenzo Viviani, though it was Foucault’s “experiment that caught the public’s attention.) The following year, Foucault used (and named) the gyroscope in a conceptually simpler experimental proof.
(Several years later he also helped take the first photo of the sun.)
“What’s a Multiverse?”*…
Last fall, a hand-picked group of the world’s top theoretical physicists received an invitation to a conference about the multiverse, a subject to which many of them had devoted the majority of their careers. Invitations like these were nothing unusual in their line of work. What was unusual was this conference was not being hosted by a university or research institute, but rather by a Scottish Duke.
And its organizer was not a physicist, but a landscape architect by the name of Charles Jencks.
The physicists were surprised to learn that Jencks had spent the past three years bringing their cosmological theories to life in the form of a massive land installation carved into the hills and pastures of the Nith Valley in southwest Scotland. It was titled “Crawick Multiverse” after the village where it was built, and its features, according to the brochure accompanying the invitation, included a Supercluster of Galaxies, twin Milky Way and Andromeda spiral mounds, the Sun Amphitheater (which seats 5,000), a Comet Walk, Black Holes (“in two different phases”), an Omphalos (a boulder-limned grotto symbolizing Earth’s “mythic navel” [pictured above]) and of course, the multiverse itself…
A panoramic painting of Crawick.
More at “The Duke, The Landscape Architect, and the World’s Most Ambitious Plan to Bring the Cosmos to Earth.”
* Penny: What’s a multiverse?
Sheldon: GET HER OUT OF HERE!
– Big Bang Theory
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As we note, with Rebecca Solnit, that a path is simply a prior interpretation of the best way to traverse a landscape, we might send perpetual birthday greetings to Jean Bernard Léon Foucault; he was born on this date in 1819. A physicist who made an early measurement of the speed of light, discovered eddy currents, and is credited with naming the gyroscope (although he did not invent it), Foucault is best remembered for the (eponymously-named) Foucault’s Pendulum– a long and heavy pendulum suspended from the roof of the Panthéon in Paris– demonstrating the effects of the Earth’s rotation. In fact, essentially the same experimental approach had been used by Vincenzo Viviani as early as 1661; but it was Foucault’s work that caught the public imagination: within years of his 1851 experiment, the were “Foucault’s Pendulums” hanging– and attracting crowds–in major cities across Europe and America.
“Alchemy is the art that separates what is useful from what is not by transforming it into its ultimate matter and essence”*…
And yet surely to alchemy this right is due, that it may be compared to the husbandman whereof Aesop makes the fable, that when he died he told his sons that he had left unto them gold buried under the ground in his vineyard: and they digged over the ground, gold they found none, but by reason of their stirring and digging the mould about the roots of their vines, they had a great vintage the year following: so assuredly the search and stir to make gold hath brought to light a great number of good and fruitful inventions and experiments, as well for the disclosing of nature as for the use of man’s life.
― Francis Bacon, The Advancement Of Learning
The Alchemist in His Studio, 17th century, Thomas Wijck, oil on panel. Via the Chemical Heritage Foundation, to which all rights are reserved
Dr. Larry Principe, professor of the history of science at Johns Hopkins, on his favorite painting in the collection of the Chemical Heritage Foundation, The Alchemist in his Studio, by Thomas Wijck (1616–1677).
email readers click here for video
Special bonus: hear a discussion of this painting (and others) from a very different perspective in “Alchemy’s Rainbow: Pigment Science and the Art of Conservation.”
* Philippus Aureolus Paracelsus
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As we trouble ourselves with transmutation, we might send swinging birthday greetings to Jean Bernard Léon Foucault; he was born on this date in 1819. One of the most versatile experimentalists of the nineteenth century, Foucault was a physicist made early measurements of the speed of light, discovered eddy currents, and is credited with naming the gyroscope (though he did not invent it). For all that, Foucault is surely best remembered for the “Foucault Pendulum,” with which he proved that the earth rotates on its axis.
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